Now that everything is moving to the cloud internet, you might think that data loss is a thing of the past. Sadly, as the past few months have taught us, this actually isn't true; we first had the Microsoft/Danger disaster, and now we have Palm and Sprint facing a class-action lawsuit over data loss for webOS phones. All this raises the question: how safe is it to store your precious data on the internet, and do you really trust the internet?

He probably lives in a small town, where everybody knows everything about each other. Nothing wrong with that; not everyone has a corpse rotting in their cupboard.

In my experience, the people worth talking to have some form of dirt somewhere. Those who claim not to can be interesting for a time, just to watch them claim how they don't. And then there are those fascinating folks who really don't seem to have any, which make them either interesting due to the profoundly boring lives they are willing to put up with, or fascinating because they are so good at hiding their dirt. Then there are folks like the current Dalai Lama who get into politics and leave there dirt out in the open where almost no one notices it.

I do, in fact, live in a small town. Like most people, I have skeletons in my closet, but I learned years ago that keeping secrets online is just short of impossible, so I just don't put things online that I don't want people to see.

As for Google using my information to target me for marketing... that's fine with me. As I said in my original post, the more Google knows about me, the better it can deliver the search results and services that I will be interested in. Bottom line is, the pros of Google knowing a lot about me outweigh the cons.